Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Cottage cheese is just this glowing monolith, you know, doesn't matter whether you acknowledge it or not. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we ask, what do you feel like eating today? And Sarah Archer, I lured you on here as our kitchen correspondent to talk with me about American food trends.
And we would each kind of just talk about a handful of things that we personally like and are interested in. Because I think we're kind of awash in food trends at the moment.
Chapter 2: What are the American food trends discussed in the episode?
And we're kind of at peak food trend because I feel like... Do you feel like every time you're on social media, someone's like... let's try the viral recipe for a thing you've never heard of. And you're like, oh yeah, of course, the viral recipe I've never heard of.
And in the olden days, it took at least a few months for something, specifically a recipe, to work its way through the newspaper and word of mouth and so on. And I just, I love trends in food as a way of learning about what people were going through and continue to go through and almost...
hilariously repeating cycles and so we're going to talk about desperation pies desperation pies and cake and so forth yeah i immediately love this and is it desperation as in like the great depression or is it desperation in like more of an existential way Here's what's great, right, is that I've definitely always heard about like water pie and vinegar pie. Exactly. And Ritz cracker pie.
Ritz cracker. Mock apple pie. Which is which is mock apple pie. Yeah. Which was on the box for Ritz crackers through the 90s, apparently, or until the 90s. Yeah. Which I really like that they were like, yeah, we know you want to make the pie. You're desperate to make the pie.
But yeah, I have always heard of them as depression pies, but they are even more deeply within that desperation pies because I think like the pies I just named were all being made. Well, not Ritz pie because Ritz crackers were invented and rolled out in 1934. I think they're a depression cracker through and through.
But those pies are like desperation pies that people were also making in the late 19th century and also on the frontier, right? which is very interesting. Oh, that is fascinating. And one of the themes here is that I guess we're looking at two trends that I don't think are as in opposition as people sometimes act like they are, which are desperation and convenience.
They go together like peanut butter and chocolate. They do. And they taste good together frequently. Water pie is basically a mock custard pie where you use water instead of milk or cream. And it is apparently quite good. I realized today that I should have made all these pies so I could tell you about it with more accuracy. Yeah, we can revisit that.
Yeah, let's go make the pie and come back and discuss. But tell me about what, well, first of all, tell us who you are and your kind of work in the kitchen arena and what you're going to tell us about today. So my kitchen obsession is mostly is kind of the middle decades of the 20th century.
And I have a special affection for the world of tomorrow and gadgets and kind of American kitchen designers competing with the Soviet Union and kind of designing things sort of at the Soviet Union. And at this very moment, I'm working on a talk because there is a really cool exhibition opening soon at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston that is all about Atomic Age food.
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Chapter 3: How did desperation pies originate during the Great Depression?
Yeah. And a lot of it is about the advertising and kind of mythos around the kitchen. So it's sort of less a literal study of kind of what everybody's kitchen was actually like and more a survey of like the ideal kitchen and kind of how that was marketed to American consumers and what it meant. And what was the ideal kitchen at that time? And do you have a sense?
I guess there's like our culture is a lot less unified maybe today, but at least from like, you know, from an anecdotal perspective or whatever kind of sense you have of this, like, is there an ideal kitchen today? Like, what do those look like to you? So I have kind of a working theory about this.
I would say in terms of the post-war era, so the kitchen historically had been, it was a site of work. And up until about the 1920s, it tended to be either just things in your dwelling that you used to heat up food and water because you maybe lived in one room or two rooms, or you were wealthy and you had people to do that for you. So that was a room that you didn't go into. Right.
So there wasn't really the idea of the kitchen as a place where you hang out. Right. Is a relatively new idea. Well, or I guess in the sense that maybe in the like, if we're talking about, you know, let's say you and I are settling on a farm in Connecticut. Mm hmm. And I'm imagining a scenario described in one of my favorite books, More Work for Mother. Mm hmm.
And we would like basically live in one room probably as like, you know, small farmers and kind of like cottage industrialists and people like, you know, kind of doing a lot of little different kinds of work here and there. And we would probably have like a hearth with a fire with like a big pot or a cauldron, I guess, on top of it. We would be having some stew, probably.
I mean, is that fair to say? More or less. You might have a cast iron stove. You might have two or three rooms. Nice. And you might hang out in the room that's most warm, which is also going to be the room where you cook food. So in as much as it's sort of it's a marker of how class in America has changed and what we expect and want for ourselves.
And so there's kind of the way that kitchen technology was presented to computer to computers. Right. See, this is the result of AI. The way that kitchen technology was presented to consumers, starting in about the 1930s and then really taking off in the 1950s, was that you could almost jump a couple of notches on the class ladder. And the way that they illustrated this was to show, let's say...
What Julia Child would call the servantless cook, this sort of new thing in the world, like a person who entertains and is well-to-do enough to entertain and have the kind of leisure time to do so and the money, but isn't wealthy enough to have staff. And this is, again, this is kind of a new category of person.
And that you're like throwing a dinner party and having and like being your own staff in a way. And this is maybe like part of the consolidation of the middle class and post-war America. Yeah. Exactly. So this is the consolidation of the middle class. And so the idea that you can then, a lot of the advertising for kitchen appliances, like remember that movie that we watched in a previous episode?
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Chapter 4: What role did convenience play in wartime food innovations?
No, I love the vibes. Premieres in 1958. That was kind of the big high profile new jet. And it basically it's jet engines that replaced propeller planes. So if you there was tourism and there absolutely were people going. But if you were to fly, say, from like New York to London or New York to Paris in 1952, that would have taken you somewhere between 12 and 15 hours.
Jet engines cut that about in half. So what we're used to where like going from the East Coast of the U.S. to Europe is roughly like six, seven, eight hours, something like that. That starts to be true in late 50s and early 60s. It is still very expensive.
So if maybe like one percent of the population was traveling to Europe by propeller plane and like reenacting the scene from Funny Face, walking down the steps of the Louvre every once or twice a year. Then a few years later in the jet age, it's still a tiny percentage. It just means that it's more upper middle class people rather than strictly just wealthy people.
Upper middle class people are going to Europe. They are taking vacations in Hawaii, which in 1959 becomes a U.S. state. They are engaging in the fantasy of a nearby paradise like Acapulco. They're visiting the Caribbean. All of this
creates an interest and a buzz in the larger sort of American psyche because you can experience a version of it, like a mediated version of that, by either going to Disney World or going to a World's Fair. And you can do both of those things by going to New York or going to Florida.
And when you do that, you'll encounter, let's say, the pavilion from Thailand and maybe get your first taste of a version of Thai food for the first time ever in your entire life in 1965. Or you can visit Disney World and go to the Polynesian Resort and experience a kind of fantasia of South Pacific culture, which it needs.
We don't need to say this, but of course, it is extraordinarily mediated and like kind of constructed of stereotypes. But I want to draw your attention to can I send you some images? Yeah, absolutely. Are you familiar with the International Sandwich Gardens? Yes. No, I assume that they're not gardens full of sandwich bearing bushes, but I sure was hoping that they were for a sec.
I was picturing that. That's what I was hoping too. But so this was at the 1964-1965 World's Fair in Queens and the 7-Up Pavilion. And 7-Up was not quite as high profile as Pepsi. It was kind of a third banana in terms of soda. But I mean, let's be honest, they still are. But what a banana. Exactly. But it's a great banana. So take a peek at this image and maybe describe what we're seeing.
I would love nothing more. OK, so first we have a beautiful sign that has a little arrow that says entrance to the 7-Up International Sandwich Gardens, the International Sandwich Gardens. And it's a garden where you eat international sandwiches and they're all on oval bread. And so they're like the space sandwiches in 2001 and space.
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Chapter 5: How did post-war disposability influence American cooking?
Exactly. If you will, if you will. And then put an incomprehensible dressing on it. I have a question for you. Yeah. That I feel like I hear this referenced a lot. And it sounds like it could be a myth to me. I might have even asked this before. So if I have, I'm sorry. But the idea is that cake mixes were invented.
American housewives didn't want to buy them because they didn't feel like they were doing enough. And so they didn't need an egg. But the cake mix people were like, OK, add an egg. Then you'll feel like you're baking. So I have heard this too. And I feel like I've heard people repeat that. Is that true?
I have heard that this is a myth, but that the myth itself is instructive because it kind of shows that there's an attachment to the idea that people need to do this, that like the egg kind of like women want to bake eggs. Ultimately, it's like their biological destiny to bake in like a labor intensive way. So I think that's like you're talking about the kind of like Betty Crocker.
Some people were meant to bake. Some people were meant to cook everything in a rice cooker and they throw it all. in there and see what the fuck happens. Exactly. It's usually I mean, it cooks it, you know, one way or the other. Totally. Totally. Yeah.
So I think that's a super instructive example and that it's kind of something that's taken on a life of its own in the culture and that there's like this. What is it that we want to be true? And like, why do we want that to be true? And what do you think we do want to be true? Well, I have to say, I think the whole sort of like egg mythos and the idea that people want to... The egg psychodrama.
The egg psychodrama, that people want to do things from scratch, is people have spent many years doing things by hand, making things by hand, cleaning, cooking, etc. All that is time that our ancestors would never get back, right? It's all, you know, we had generations of women, particularly before us, who did nothing but that and didn't have a choice.
And I think the idea that there's an attachment to it and that people like it, which is not to say that everybody hates it, because I think people actually do. Right. I mean, as with everything, some people like it. Some people do. Exactly. The idea that it's kind of a widespread desire is almost a way of making...
the lives of women of the past seem less sad because it means that maybe they were, do you know what I mean? Like maybe they wanted to, maybe they wanted to forego education and travel. No, you're right. God, that's really interesting. Just a theory. This is just a, this is just a hypothesis, if you will. No, I, I believe it though.
I mean, it makes, I mean, and multiple things can be true, you know, or true to different degrees, but that feels accurate to me. And I mean, well, OK, so this connects to can I tell you about one of my cakes? Yes. OK, so, well, this is really the cake of the hour. And so this begins with Peg Bracken, of course, who we've talked about many times. Oh, my God. Of course. Peg.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of foreign food trends in the 1960s?
And now that would be considered, you know, in kind of like trendy food world would be considered decadent because pasta is carbs and it's, you know. Yeah, we just kind of keep going back in these loops.
we keep going into kind of there's different versions of what it means and not to get too far into like the more extreme ends of what's going on today but like i do find the carnivore diet thing so fascinating um and disturbing and one of the things i always come back to is this idea that like well ancient man was eating all this butter and it's like we wouldn't
have butter if we hadn't had agriculture and like domesticated and created like the cow as we know it and like where was all this butter coming from that ancient man was supposed to be eating and i realized that that's not really the point it's just like creating a frame story so people can eat butter because they always wished that they could i don't know you can just you can eat butter you can just eat butter and it doesn't have to be a philosophy it's not you can just like
You can just eat it. And that's also kind of like like protein creep. Like there's kind of a scope creep happening with protein is now. Well, that really is like one of the huge food trends of today. And I haven't researched this, so I'm not going to like, yeah, opine too much. But but it is like it's something that, you know, things become trends for many reasons.
But I think partly this seems like very convenient for like the dairy and meat industry.
It sure does.
Which are becoming popular. You know, too expensive and who can maybe hold hands with some people who are active in conservative politics who can say, right. And meanwhile, just, you know, you could also try and get enough fiber. And it's interesting how also in this like push for protein, where we're putting protein in water now. I'm seeing very little advertising for lentils.
Where is Big Lentil? Lentils have, I think, an equal amount of protein and fiber. Oh, a ton. No, they're like incredible. Yeah. Show me Big Lentil. They're so small that Big Lentil would only be medium. Yeah. I mean, it kind of there is a strange way in which it reminds me a little bit of... There is a display.
I think you can see you can see images of it, if not actual film footage of Norman Belgetti's design for it was actually the original Futurama that was at the 1939 World's Fair. And this was basically a kind of future occupied by this huge system of highways. And it was sponsored by General Motors.
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